The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [128]
This “uncanny doubleness” of catachresis, putting in question “the relation between literal and figurative, proper and transferred,” suggests that it may be a “conceptual” mistake to think of metaphors as concepts prior to their occurrence in language. “The leg of a table” is not a concept but a poem naturalized into ordinary language.
Affecting Metaphysics
I will return briefly at the end of this chapter to the “mixed mode” figures (like the centaurs to which John Locke took such exception), since they appear importantly, and indeed as instructive “figures of abuse,” in one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays. But rather than pursue this question in Locke or in philosophy, I’d like to bring it home to literature, and to metaphors and figures in poetry, by citing one of the most famous critical attacks on figures of speech (especially metaphors and/or catachreses) in the annals of English criticism, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s critique of those writers who—because of the attack—would come to be known in the history of English studies as “the metaphysical poets.” Here is Johnson’s opinion of the style of this school, poets like Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and John Donne.
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
And:
Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments; and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and laboured particularities, the prospects of nature, or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon.19
The term metaphysical, which refers to the branch of philosophy concerned with questions of being and knowing, was suggested in John Dryden’s complaint about Donne, “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love.”20 Whether the comparisons favored by Donne from the new science are really metaphysical, or in fact intensely material and physical (lovers as “stiff twin compasses,” tears compared to a globe full of continents, specific and arcane medical knowledge), it is clear that they irritated Dr. Johnson and offended his belief that “great thoughts are always general.”21 “Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?” he asks, citing these lines:
Though God be our true glass through which we see
All, since the being of all things is he,
Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive
Things in proportion fit, by perspective
Deeds of good men; for by their living here,
Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.
Likewise, he declares that “their fictions were often violent and unnatural,” giving as his example a passage from Abraham Cowley’s “Bathing in the River”:
The fish around her crowded, as they do
To the false light that treacherous fishes show,
And all with as much ease might taken be,
As she at first took me:
For ne’er did light so clear
Among the waves appear
Though every night the sun himself set there.22
Whether or not the reader concurs with Dr. Johnson about the effect and value of these passages, I think it is probable that it would not do them—or Johnson—justice to describe